Detecting acromegaly: screening for disease with a morphable model

  • Authors:
  • Erik Learned-Miller;Qifeng Lu;Angela Paisley;Peter Trainer;Volker Blanz;Katrin Dedden;Ralph Miller

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts;University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts;Christie Hospital, Manchester, UK;Christie Hospital, Manchester, UK;Universität Siegen, Germany;Max-Planck Institut für Informatik;University of Kentucky Medical Center, Lexington, Kentucky

  • Venue:
  • MICCAI'06 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention - Volume Part II
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Acromegaly is a rare disorder which affects about 50 of every million people. The disease typically causes swelling of the hands, feet, and face, and eventually permanent changes to areas such as the jaw, brow ridge, and cheek bones. The disease is often missed by physicians and progresses beyond where it might if it were identified and treated earlier. We consider a semi-automated approach to detecting acromegaly, using a novel combination of support vector machines (SVMs) and a morphable model. Our training set consists of 24 frontal photographs of acromegalic patients and 25 of disease-free subjects. We modelled each subject’s face in an analysis-by-synthesis loop using the three-dimensional morphable face model of Blanz and Vetter. The model parameters capture many features of the 3D shape of the subject’s head from just a single photograph, and are used directly for classification. We report encouraging results of a classifier built from the training set of real human subjects.